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Solving The Storage Riddle: Page 3 of 5

In addition to helping HIP meet regulatory mandates, the infrastructure has enabled it to use storage as a business differentiator, by, for example, being able to call up an image in response to a customer query. "HIP was keen on having a storage infrastructure they could expand," says Steven Foskett, GlassHouse's director of strategic services. "By keeping more of their data online, they're able to not only meet regulations but also satisfy customers."

Another GlassHouse customer, Allianz Life Insurance Co. of North America, developed a tiered storage architecture, with tier one consisting of EMC arrays, tier two Network Appliance devices, and tier three EMC's Centera. "We like to keep things simple," says David Kaercher, VP of infrastructure. "Previous companies I've worked for have had islands of SANs. Here we just have a single enterprise storage environment."

It also helped Allianz expand storage economically. From a previous environment of 70 to 80 terabytes of direct-attached storage, the insurer migrated to one where it has close to 100 terabytes of shared storage, even as the company has grown at a 15% to 20% clip. "We've maximized utilization of existing and future storage assets," Kaercher says.

As the need for availability increases, companies are looking to their backup services providers to not only offer disaster-recovery facilities but to provide managed services as well. SunGard Availability Services offers a basic backup-and-restore service based on disk-to-disk-to-tape, on up to complete hot-site and failover capabilities with mirrored servers and disks, and vaulting solutions for storing archived data off site. "Customers want systems that blend disaster recovery and managed services," says Lenny Monsour, SunGard's director of product management.

Regulatory Requirements
One SunGard customer, PSS/ World Medical Inc., relocated its data-center operations from Jackson, Miss., to SunGard's Philadelphia center when Hurricane Katrina struck. "We do high availability with SunGard," says Brian Finley, chief technology officer of PSS/ World Medical. "We made Philadelphia our production site and relocated 35 call-center workers to SunGard's Atlanta facility."

PSS/World Medical maintains a full backup copy of data in Philadelphia and takes a snapshot once a day of its Oracle production database. "We take the snapshot at 2 a.m., with a recovery objective of 20 minutes." For regulatory purposes, PSS/World Medical is considering archiving data on nearline media, which is used to move data online quickly. To comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, it's required to retain seven years of sales-tax history. "We're looking at keeping all of that data online," Finley says. "We've talked to EMC and are looking at software-replication products."